Follow the bouncing detainee ….

Human rights groups have long been critical of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s practice of housing detainees in remote places, and a new report has some interesting statistics.
For one, the bulk of detainee transfers are to Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, which collectively have a detainee to immigration attorney ratio of 510 to one. For another, transferred detainees spend more than three times as long in detention as those who stay in the same place. And transfer costs alone amount to about $366 million.
The report, “A Costly Move: Far and Frequent Transfers Impede Hearings for Immigrant Detainees in the United States, was released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch and is based on the group’s analysis of 12 years of transfer data.
The review of two million transfer records found that more than 46 percent of detainees were transferred more than twice, with a typical transfer taking detainees from Pennsylvania to Texas, some 1,642 miles.
“The ICE buses and planes that crisscross the United States bring dire consequences for detainees and for ICE. But so far ICE has taken few steps to end its dependence on this chaotic game of detainee musical chairs,” said report author Alison Parker.
The problem is immigrants who are lawfully here or have legitimate asylum claims often end up in places where there aren’t many immigration attorneys. And those who do have attorneys find their lawyers among the last to learn when and where they’ve been transferred.
“I have never represented someone who has not been in more than three detention facilities,” one attorney is quoted as saying. “Could be El Paso, Texas, a facility on Arizona, or they send people to Hawaii. … I have been practicing immigration law for more than a decade. Never once have I been notified of (my client’s) transfer. Never.”
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The report’s release comes just a week after ICE confirmed detainees would be moved out of the “tent city” in Raymondville, which went up in a flash amid a Bush Administration vow to solve the space shortage that meant unauthorized immigrants were being let go .
ICE was vague about whether the space’s change in plans (it will now be a Bureau of Prisons contract facility for convicted criminals with immigration issues) has anything to do with the distance criticism, but the Willacy Detention Center ultimately grew to house more than 3,000 cots, making the remote South Texas facility the nation’s largest immigration detention center.

“As a result of the agency’s detention reform efforts, ICE has drafted a new policy designed to reduce the transfer of detainees who are represented by counsel or have other ties to a particular community and has notified the union of our intent to implement the new policy. By keeping detainees, as often as possible, near the place of apprehension, ICE hopes to minimize disruptions to families, legal services, and immigration proceedings. Along with our progress in adding additional detention resources where they are needed, a reduction in transfers would save on costs and reduce delays in immigration proceedings,” said ICE spokeswoman Nina Pruneda.
And ICE should by now be nearly two years into a promised detention center overhaul.